Twitter to sue Elon Musk after he cancels $44bn takeover deal

Elon Musk has withdrawn his $44bn (£36.5billion) bid to buy Twitter citing issues involving the deal for the social media platform.

A letter from the billionaire’s lawyers addressed to the social media platform said Twitter “has not complied with its contractual obligations” relating to the information it holds on fake accounts

In response, however, Twitter has said it will sue the Tesla CEO if he does not follow through with the agreed deal.

They claim Mr Musk has requested data about fake or spam accounts for nearly two months, but sometimes Twitter ignored his requests, rejected them “for reasons that appear to be unjustified” and claimed to comply while giving “incomplete or unusable information”.

His lawyers said the Tesla CEO and his financial advisors have been repeatedly been requesting information from Twitter as far back as May 9.

The document said: “Mr. Musk is terminating the Merger Agreement because Twitter is in material breach of multiple provisions of that Agreement, appears to have made false and misleading representations upon which Mr. Musk relied when entering into the Merger Agreement, and is likely to suffer a Company Material Adverse Effect.”

But walking away from the deal would mean Mr Musk would have to prove that Twitter breached the original agreement or risk being sued for a $1bn breakup fee due to terms of the deal.

Twitter said on Friday that it planned to sue Musk to complete the $44bn merger and that it was “confident” it would prevail.

“The Twitter board is committed to closing the transaction on the price and terms agreed upon with Mr Musk and plans to pursue legal action to enforce the merger agreement,” said Bret Taylor, the chair of the board at Twitter.

The richest man on earth had reached a deal to buy Twitter on April 25, with Musk offering to purchase all of the company’s shares for $54.20 each.

Musk had previously threatened to pull out of the deal unless the social media platform proved spam and fake accounts accounted for five per cent of all users.

Last month, Twitter gave Mr Musk access to its “firehose”, which is its storage location of raw data on hundreds of millions of daily tweets, according to multiple reports.